Electro-physiology and electro-therapeutics : showing the best methods for the medical uses of electricity / By Alfred C. Garratt.
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country life a security against it. In place of a tender childhood, care, and educational influences being assigned, as predisposing causes of hysteria, — exceptions there may be, — it would be far more just to thus stigmatize, if either, a harassing or harsh youthful experience. Muscular Hyperesthesia — " Muscle-pains." In hysteria, particularly, the muscular system must naturally be expected to play an active part; indeed, the voluntary mus- cles are a common " theatre " for the manifestation of all this troop of phenomena, whether in the form of convulsive paroxysms, in paralysis or debility, anaesthesia, or hyperesthesia. The most condensed and practical views on this subject we find from the pen of M. Briquet, of Paris, who says,* " The pains expressed in the walls of the splanchnic cavities arc of such common occurrence in hysteria, (but not here alone,) that all observers have noticed them, although failing to recognize their true source and seat. They have been usually designated as' nervous pains,' but without any further explanation; and even the few authors who have recognized them as being muscular have failed to appreciate the part that hypcraisthesia of muscles plays in hysteria, or the hysterical subject. From among four hundred hysterical women who were examined particularly in reference to this point, there were not more than twenty who did not ex- hibit such muscular pains." "Writers upon hysterical affections have passed very lightly over this condition, although it is so constant an accompaniment of the disease, that he thinks there is not a woman subject to hys- teria who does not manifest it in one or more parts. But under the term of hyperesthesia, or " exalted sensibility" there maybe comprised various conditions formerly designated as pains, neu- rosis, neuralgia, or other painful nervous phenomena. In the present article M. Briquet confines himself to the consideration of hyperesthesia, as it affects the muscles, particularly in hysteri- * Medical Times and Gazette, 1858, p. 558.